Consider an all-to-familiar and often talked about scenario. A man somewhere between the ages of thirty or thirty-five and forty-five or even fifty-five goes to Thailand because he's heard numerous stories about all the young and attractive Thai girls that are available for sex and the semblance of love (the well known girlfriend experience), and all for a relative pittance. This foreigner—this farang as he will be known in Thailand—swears to himself that he will not get involved romantically with a hooker; after all, he comes from the West (Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Great Britain, the United States, Canada) where prostitution and prostitutes are roundly and strongly proscribed. The man would almost never think of marrying a hooker that he met in a brothel or on the streets of his own country. But once in Thailand —in Bangkok , Pattaya, Phuket, Chiang Mai—he quickly discovers that Thai hookers are uncommonly irresistible. They are nothing like the prostitutes he has known or heard about in his home country.

Thai hookers have several things going for them. They are younger than any woman he could possibly date at home. Many of them are strikingly attractive, and lovingly small and cuddly, and not at all like the fat women (whales in the vernacular of middle-aged men in the West) he has come to dislike, especially in the form of ex-wives or lovers. Furthermore, Thai hookers, initially at any rate, seem happily subservient, and full of unbounded love, and they make great love—or so he convinces himself. And then too among many other attractive traits, Thai hookers don't seem bothered, or only minimally so, by the great age difference—ten, fifteen, twenty years or more in some cases. Or at least they are not bothered in ways that the farang is familiar with in his own country. In fact, he will conclude that the only people that will be preoccupied, even obsessively so, with this matter of age difference are all those people back home who, when learning about what he is up to, will conclude that he is just another “dirty old man.”

The typical man in this all-too-familiar scenario is one who is coming off one or more bad relationships or marriages in his home country, and he is often deeply bitter because he is making heavy child support and alimony payments and often has had to relinquish half or more of total household assets in a divorce settlement. But now that he is in love with a Thai hooker he suddenly feels that he can start his life over, and in a way utterly unimaginable in his homeland. So, going against all that he told himself before coming, and all that he's heard from others about how he will be almost surely played for a sucker by a Thai hooker, he falls madly in love with one. And in so doing he quickly convinces himself of several things. He believes he can overlook her sordid past--all those scores or even hundreds of men that she has slept with and sexually done everything imaginable with. He convinces himself that he is as good a lover as any of the men the young hooker has ever had. He also convinces himself that whatever great cultural differences there may be between this young adorable hooker with a sixth grade education who probably spent most of her life on an impoverished rice farm in Isaan, and who has a different concept of family and dealing with interpersonal issues than anything he grew up with, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that cannot be easily overcome in the name of “love” and all that he has to offer this young woman in a mutually loving relationship. He can either stay in country and provide a new and rich and unimaginable life for himself and his new partner, or he can take the hooker to a strange country where she will not for some time speak the language fluently or easily make friends and will have to learn to live in a climate that is trying if only because it is so different than what she is used to. But love is love, and love lasts forever, does it not? Or so imagines a man in those days and weeks and months of blinding passion that only those in love can truly understand.

Now what is never admitted, or even really known about in any rational or quasi-scientific sense in this new life with an alien hooker from a largely unknown culture, is that the man is, in fact, clinically sick. He is sick in the same sense that a schizophrenic or a person suffering from chronic depression or bi-polar disorder is sick. There is a chemical imbalance in his brain, just as there is with schizophrenics and the millions, tens of millions of people worldwide, who suffer from chronic depression. But unlike people everywhere with mental illnesses that we now know are principally the result of brain chemistry imbalances rather than problems rooted in twisted childhoods and bad parents, it never occurs to the farang madly in love with a Thai hooker that he could be sick in the very same way as mental patients are sick. Love is, in fact, a sickness that looks a lot like someone with a compulsive—obsessive disorder, or one seriously addicted to the most dangerous drugs known. Love is a sickness that can commonly last in rather severe form for a period ranging from twelve to eighteen months.

There's an old and familiar saying that men everywhere, when in the presence of young (and even not so young) and attractive women, think with their “little heads;” their dicks, in other words. They don't “think” straight, or rationally. We now know that the idea of the “little head telling the big head what to do” is much more than a crude street joke often voiced among men. We know because of tests with functional magnetic resonance imaging that chemicals called serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine show up in quantities in the brain when “in love” that one does not see in people not “in love.”

Now one can easily come up with some quite good evolutionary reasons for this change in the chemistry of the brain upon falling love, but that is not my purpose here. Rather what I want to emphasize is that being in love is a genuine sickness akin to many mental illnesses, and such a sickness—being in love--serves an important function in the mammal mating game. And mating, of course, as Darwin so clearly saw, is at the very heart of evolution or what he referred to as descent with modification. At the risk of repetition, and the addition of a few details, it needs to be noted that being in love is not merely the alteration of just any kind of brain chemistry. Rather, when one is in love, elevated dopamine levels are evident in the nucleus accumbens, that part of the mammalian brain associated with craving and addiction. That very part of the brain, in fact, that cocaine and heroin so effectively work on. (For more on this argument among humans and in species as different as elephants, bats, butterflies and chimpanzees, see Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, New York , Henry Holt, 2004).

So, to summarize at this point, we have with whoremongers in Thailand a rather sizeable population of vulnerable (some might say highly vulnerable) males who quickly see an opportunity to begin their lives over with a young and attractive woman who seemingly has everything that an ex-wife or two didn't have, and that women at home that he might have reasonable access to as a future partner just do not possess. But when the man falls “in love” with that very person—a Thai hooker—that he finds so desirable, he is, in fact, like men everywhere and for long stretches of mammalian evolutionary time--clinically sick. He is, in his sickness, drugged, doped if you will. And, yes, blind and easily gulled.

Because the man in love is sick, and the sickness can easily persist for more than a year, he will tolerate an unusual amount of lying and deceptions from the hooker, or anyone else he's in love with for that matter. He will repeatedly overlook all of the many obvious signs that would suggest—and do clearly tell those not similarly affected--that he is in for a great deal of emotional trauma and financial loss in the not-too-distant future. The in-love man refuses, adamantly refuses, to believe that he is anything like any of the other men who have fallen in love with Thai hookers. His situation is, he will be quick to tell anyone who will listen, “unique.” His Thai hooker girlfriend that he's in love with is “different,” never, in his mind, like all the other scamming hookers he had heard so much about. This man in his own mind is most certainly not sick; he is merely deeply in love. He even heartily embraces the addiction of love—just as those on coke and heroin love their addictions. Anyone, then, who wishes to advise a person in love of his or her condition, and draws attention to altered brain chemistry and the many and obvious perils of what any truly addictive sickness entails, “just doesn't understand.” Indeed, such a person to a person in love may sound like a certifiable quack, or like someone who simply takes too seriously the biology of our species and evolution by natural selection.

Enter the Thai hooker as loved one. She, of course, has no concept whatever of sickness in the mind of the farang as I have just outlined it. Rather, what she and those like her quickly learn is that foreign men who get involved romantically with them are simply the best and biggest gulls or marks imaginable. They will accept an unending string of deceptions and lies, and they will go on accepting them even when the lies and deceptions are baldly transparent. Thus, a farang in love can be milked, and repeatedly milked emotionally and financially. Until finally one day there's a large fatal misstep—one or two lies and deceptions too many, perhaps a lie or deception that is just too big following on all that preceded. It is at this stage that the brain chemistry itself may be changing, and perhaps quite rapidly. The direction of the chemical positive feedback loops have been reversed. The farang is “coming to his senses,” he's beginning to ”understand” how badly he's been taken. And before long he and those around him will, in their own words, see that he is once again his normal, rational self. All will go well, until he once again falls in love and serious changes in his brain begin to take effect, and then chemically magnify altered brain states to such an extent that the man is once again “blind.” He will no longer be receptive to friendly counseling and all the obvious evidence around him that he is being financially milked and repeatedly taken for a sucker.

So much has been said or written about the “dumb,” the “stupid,” the “irrepressibly stupid” farang in Thailand . But using these kinds of unflattering and heavily judgmental words is the wrong way to characterize the predicament of any man or woman in love. People who are sick are not stupid; they are, well, just sick. They are no different than the tens of millions of people all over the world who have mental illnesses because of “bad” brain chemistry. People who, with good medical attention, can be diagnosed and treated with medicines. Thus, distasteful as the idea may be, romantic love is a sickness and should be seen as such. (Hookers, I should note, may also share many of the problems that come with love sickness, because many of them do in fact genuinely fall in love with farang. At least long enough and convincingly enough to get what they so desperately need—or come to need—money.)

Is there a way to avoid this sickness or deal with it, such that fewer farang will find themselves hopelessly strapped with this sickness called love not long after meeting and sleeping with an irresistibly young, charming and beautiful Thai hooker? I think there are two main ways to avoid this “drugging,” this addiction based in the biochemistry of the brain. One is to literally use drugs such as Prozac that blunt or attenuate love sickness. In other words, add to the Viagra or Cialis or alcohol cocktail that so many whoremongers use a manufactured drug that has just those properties and in sufficient doses to keep dopamine and serotonin and other key brain chemicals at “normal” not-in-love levels. Another way to deal with the problem, and one followed by a great many whoremongers who have no knowledge whatsoever of what I have outlined here, is to butterfly. And do so with discipline. Simply follow the rule that no Thai hooker (or any person for that matter to extend the argument), no matter how attractive or unusual or good is bed, should be seen more than two or at most three times. To break this rule is to invite disaster, allow the brain chemistry to be sufficiently altered such that one simply cannot resist the incredible high that is no different that a coke or heroin high but which we so innocently and naively call love. Stickman's thoughts: